Hunting for the Megalithic Stone Circle in Morocco

January 19, 2011

Over the past few years, we’ve seen some great discoveries in Google Earth, including some quite remarkable finds that were only made possible thanks to the widespread high-resolution imagery that is available in Google Earth.
Some examples include a geologist that “accidentally” discovered a meteor crater, another crater in the Saharan Desert, and a buried Peruvian pyramid.
Today we bring you the story of Graham Salisbury, and how he was able to track down the megalithic stone circle of Mzora using a black and white photograph and Google Earth.

Salisbury quotes several sources as saying it’s “extraordinarily difficult to find” and “one would have to have access to a military satellite to find it“, but he felt that it could be found in Google Earth with enough research and patience.
You can read all of the details on his blog, but he did an excellent job of figuring out which area to search and then tracking down. If you compare the screenshot from Google Earth below with the black and white image above, I think it’s pretty clear that he succeeded.

If you’d like to see it for yourself, you can fly there using this KML file. Also, you can check out this post that Graham wrote which explains what the Megalithic site is all about.
Great work Graham!

About Mickey Mellen

Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.

Michael B
Thank you for your comments. The Panaromio layer was of no use when I started hunting because there are multiple sites that Panaromio users had identified as the correct one which added to the confusion.

I am fascinated by comments like “extraordinarily difficult to find” and “one would have to have access to a military satellite to find it”. We went to Morocco three years ago and saw M’soura (as they spelled it) mentioned in the guidebook we had (with picture). We had little difficulty in persuading our driver to take us there and, while he didn’t know it personally, the description in the guidebook and the road map of Morocco we had meant we found it very easily.

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